That's for sure! I thought the good thing about using C++ was that you had classes to simplify standard programming tasks like string handling!

If the overhead of the (presumably well optimized) string classes for the language itself are "too slow", it leaves me wondering what's left in the language that's still "fast enough" to be usable? Wouldn't it be faster to resort to pure C. at that point?

Pardon my ignorance on the subject; I learned C. ten years ago, but never got around to learning C++; my books kept getting out of date as the language was revised. :-( Isn't the STL part of the C++ language standard these days, or is that a pending idea? I'm all confused! (as usual...)